Naked in the Promised Land (45 page)

Yet Binky and I had already plunked down our deposit for the wonderful house. What if I got a Tuesday–Thursday teaching schedule? I could fly to Los Angeles after my last class on Thursdays and fly back on Tuesdays. Five nights a week I'd be with Binky in our home. Why not? As associate professor, my salary would go up by about twenty-five percent, which would more than pay for the airfare and a little apartment I'd rent near campus.

And the baby?

I'd do it for just one year; then I'd return to the original plan.

But what if I weren't allowed to teach Women's Liberation in Literature? I'd go to Gene's office now and say,
I'll stay if I can teach a feminist class.
It would be like rolling dice: If he said
yes,
I'd stay;
no,
and I'd be off to L.A. Either way would be fine.

"Why not?" He shrugged. "We've never had such a class." How simple he made it. "Here's something else you might be interested in," he said, handing me a memo that he pulled from a file. It was a call for semester-long classes that would go out to the Fresno community over television. "Why not do it as a television class also?" he suggested.

"But we just bought a house," Binky cried. She looked at me now as if I really were insane. "I thought that was what you wanted."

"I do. I do. But it'll be just for one year. Love, listen to me, we'll be together five nights a week." I went over the whole litany again. The promotion. Women's Liberation in Literature. The television program. Everything except what I didn't want to say out loud because I was scared to admit it even to myself—that if our L.A. plans didn't work, I'd have stopped being a professor, and who would I be? "It's only for a year," I promised again.

Tuesday mornings at seven-twenty, Binky drops me off at the Los Angeles airport on her way to Marshall High School, and I race to catch the seven-forty puddle-jumper to Fresno—fifty minutes in the sky (where I keep checking my watch as I finish grading papers or review the class notes I'd written over the weekend; if we land late, I'm sunk), then another race out of the plane and through the terminal to the old clunker Plymouth that I keep at the Fresno airport parking lot (silent supplications to the god of heaps to make it start), and a zoom down Clinton Avenue, burning amber lights all the way to the college, where I dodge through a quad jammed with sauntering students, bound up the steps of San Ramon two at a time, and tear down the corridor to arrive, shaky-limbed, at my office door, no more than a minute or so late for my 9
A.M.
office hour if I'm lucky.

Every hour is packed—I teach American Ethnic Writing, Victorian Literature, Women's Liberation in Literature. On Tuesday nights I go to one of the Fresno television stations and record Women's Liberation in Literature in front of a camera, modulating my voice the way Irene showed me almost twenty years
earlier, using body language like an actress, words like a scholar, zeal like a preacher. When I'm not teaching or holding office hours or going to department meetings or working with Omar on
From the Barrio
(we now have a contract with Harper and Row), I go back to my apartment across the street from campus and wander about the stuffy rooms like a small stone rolling around in a big, dark box. Why am I in Fresno when I want to be home, lounging in the Topsy room or writing in the garden cottage? I'm exhausted, but I can't rest. I miss Binky.

But when I get off the puddle-jumper in Los Angeles at eleven on Thursday
evenings, we hug each other and fall into silence. It's as if the week apart has made us shy with each other, as if we have to get acquainted all over again. But we've known each other for years, so the sweet buzz of beginnings is no longer there, and most weeks we even seem to forget to make love or we just don't get around to it. I love her, but are we still lovers? Maybe that doesn't matter so much because aren't we family for each other?—family I'm still hoping will grow.

There were now four women and twenty-eight men in the department. Ingrid was a young poet who inspired from the male faculty the chivalry I had already learned to suspect because they saw the woman before they saw the colleague. They addressed her in gentle voices, they almost bowed when they held doors open for her—and they didn't renew her contract. But that year she gave a seminar on women poets. Here we were, in the fall of 1970, on a little campus in the middle of the agribusiness capital of the world, and two women professors were teaching feminist courses in the English Department. In the Art Department there was a visiting professor, Judy Gerowitz (who became Judy Chicago before the year was over), who taught courses in feminist art. Three of us at Fresno State College—what a happy irony, we agreed. It couldn't happen at a place like UCLA or Berkeley, where the faculty was hidebound. It certainly
wasn't
happening there.

The excitement was palpable in my Women's Liberation in Literature course. "You know how students complain that their courses aren't relevant to their lives?" a young woman in jeans came to my office to say. "This one is so relevant that night and day I can't get it out of my head." A bespectacled older woman student stopped by my table in the cafeteria to tell me "This class is making me question all the things that used to make me say 'That's the way life is and you can't do anything about it.'"

We were conspirators, Ingrid and I told each other, teaching dangerous, revolutionary ideas. "Are we getting away with this because we're beneath their notice?" we marveled, "or maybe the guys just don't understand what
feminist
means." What we were doing really was dangerous and revolutionary—it was impossible to teach Women in Literature or Women in Art in 1970 and not be fiercely political. In later years our passion came to seem excessive, but in 1970 it felt exactly right. For me, it was about helping my students see the barely masked hatred, the stereotypes and mindless pusillanimity, in the images of women that some of the most revered male writers had concocted, and it was about discovering with my students neglected female genius. It was all angry-making stuff, for them and for me. What did it signal if not a call for a cataclysmic upheaval in thinking about literature? And, by an extension that the class couldn't ignore, how could that not lead to an upheaval in how you thought about the male-female relationships in your own life? If the class was successful, the student who finished it in December would not be the same being as the one who began it in September. Ingrid's and Judy's classes were at least as political. But to the higher administration, revolutionaries were people with Adam's apples and beards. We were blissfully safe.

My department wasn't. That winter, in the presence of newspaper and television reporters, our chairman accused the administration of placing student spies in the classes of radical professors. The dean of the school was not going to be upstaged for drama. He ordered the campus police to lock up the department files, bolt the door of the English office, and keep Gene out. A uniformed guard with a gun was stationed on the roof of San Ramon. Fresno State College made the national news.

"This place is a laughingstock. Everyone is nuts," I groaned to Binky over the phone. "Except for my students, it's torture to be here."

"Well, you'll teach one more semester, and then you'll never have to go back," she said.

Dottie invited us often to parties in Manhattan Beach, where she and Betty had a circle of friends who were nothing like the women I'd known at the Open Door. Some were film editors or set designers; most were teachers, social workers, nurses, real estate agents—serious members of the few professions that had been open to females ten or twenty years before, when these women first set out on their own. There were some gay men too in the circle—"honorary lesbians," Dottie called them. Roger, my favorite, was Japanese, with a long, thin face and a lithe
dancer's body, like the kimonoed figures in ancient art prints. He loved to camp—to throw a lace armchair doily on his head, grab me by the arm, and strut me through the genial knots that were chatting and sipping beer from frosted mugs on Dottie's bougainvillea-covered patio. "We're getting married," he announced with prissy lips.

"Nope, I've already been there," I laughed.

He ignored my demurral. "Guess which one's the bride." He tossed his head and primped for his audience.

He'll never be my bride ... but he's hit a nerve,
I realized.
Why didn't I think of it before? If I get pregnant without being married, how will my mother bear it? She'll think some man has destroyed my life the way Moishe destroyed hers. She'll be sick with worry and shame, and so will my aunt.

But what if I
told
them I was getting married ... to someone in Fresno ... who was leaving right away to take a job back east ... in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, say ... and that I had to stay in California for my own job? Then, when Binky and I traveled in the summers with our baby, I could tell them that I was going east, to visit my husband in Pittsburgh.

"Take a picture with me, Roger." It wouldn't work if you had a family who knew the world, who might hop a plane across the country to introduce themselves to the absent groom—but my mother and aunt had probably never even heard of Pittsburgh. "You'll never have to meet them," I told Roger. "Just lend me your image to show them."

"Haven't you noticed I'm Japanese?" He frowned.

He's right. Why throw the complication of race into it?
"Will you wear these?" I pulled a pair of sunglasses from my purse. Around my ring finger we wrapped a gold cigar band lifted from a Cubano that Thomas, his movie-extra boyfriend, smoked. I plucked one of Dottie's daisies, and when Roger and I sat close together on the lawn, I held it up in my left hand so that the camera could not miss the wedding ring. He circled me with his arm, and Dottie snapped the picture.

It's the one I find after Rae is gone, fourteen years later, in a little falling-apart album she'd kept in the top drawer of her dresser and filled with photos of me, from my birth to her death.

After Gene's removal as chairman, the English Department became a protectorate, chafing under the uneasy jurisdiction of the same hated
dean who'd stationed the armed guard on the roof of San Ramon. Three months later, he assembled us in the department meeting room—grim citizens of a defeated little country. His head swiveled on an Ichabod Crane neck as he eyeballed us from left to right and back again. "You have two choices," he barked. "You can nominate a chairman who'll be acceptable to me and our new president, Dr. Baxter, or we can find a chairman from the outside and bring him in." White knuckles showed
on the fists of the men around me, but they were silent. I too said nothing. I'd be turning in my resignation anyway, right after spring break, and then I'd get on with my life—with the baby, with the books I'd write. Sometimes, when I waited for Binky to pull the car out of our garage on Tuesday mornings, I'd look longingly at the little cottage in the back. I would put a cradle in there so that when I went to my desk every morning, I'd be able to take my baby with me. I'd rock her with one hand and write with the other.